A decided difference is noticed between the book-plates of the Northern and the Southern Colonies. In the South, to which came men of wealth and leisure with cultivated tastes, we would expect to find the little superfluities and niceties of daily life sooner in vogue and more generally used. Bringing books and musical instruments with them, retaining their connection with the far-away home by correspondence and visits, sending their sons to the great Universities to be educated, and to the Law Schools for a finishing course, and ordering their clothes, books, furniture, and all of the luxuries of life from England, they would naturally be the first to use the book-plate. Very few of the Southern plates were engraved by American engravers. They were nearly all done in London, when some member of the family was over, or by order from the Colony; for this reason the Southern plates are better in heraldry, design, and execution than those of New England and New York. They were the product of men experienced in such work; they were all armorial and in the prevailing English mode.
The earliest comers to New England had a prejudice against coats-of-arms and trinkets of such-like character, which their descendants, however, soon forgot. Pride of ancestry and love of the display of aristocratic claims developed when the hard circumstances of the former years had worn off, and we find the prominent families of the North using book-plates, and having their arms upon their coaches. In one important feature, however, these Northern plates differ from the Southern,—they are mostly the work of our native engravers, very few being done in England.
The work of these native artisans, who were mostly self-taught in this art of engraving on copper, is confessedly inferior to that of the London experts found upon the Southern plates, both in drawing and execution, but their work is of more value to the collector from this very fact of their being American work. They furnish examples of native skill, both in engraving and in copper-plate printing.
The ornamentation of buttons, spoons, tableware, and other articles of silver was already practised when the demand for the book-plate arose, so that there were skilful men ready to turn their attention to this new branch of their art.
